Description

The songs in this collection were recorded and annotated as part of the project ‘Metre and Melody in Dinka Speech and Song’, a project carried out by researchers from the University of Edinburgh and the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, and funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council as part of their ‘Beyond Text’ programme. The project aimed to understand the interplay between traditional Dinka musical forms and the Dinka language (which distinguishes words not just by different consonants and vowels but also by means of rhythm, pitch and voice quality), and to learn more about the way the song tradition responded to the disruptions of the long Sudanese civil war. In this context, we aimed to record a large collection of Dinka songs for preservation in a long-term sound archive. This collection is the result of that effort. It presents song material from 36 Dinka singers and groups of singers. Further details can be found in the readme file. The collection is accompanied by an index, which is explained in the readme file.